“Rob Carter: Culte” at ebersmoore

For the better part of a year, Rob Carter’s HD video cameras have snapped one photograph per minute, documenting in fluid time-lapse alchemy the growth of bean and squash plants. In his two-channel video Culte, the hypnotic plants overtake a mock-up of a sports stadium with the facade of a cathedral.

The plants serve as a metaphor for the life and death cycle of human inventions: Carter persuasively parallels religion, which is fading (in his native England, at least), and sport, which is in its heyday, through his hybrid church-arena structure and side-by-side recordings of religious and sporting chants. While Culte suggests neither cultural institution will last forever, Carter’s delicate and thoughtful handling of his subject reveals his fascination with both.

The artist’s maquette of the building is also installed in the gallery, surrounded by dead plant matter and a live sprout from the model stadium’s playing field. It demonstrates Carter’s artistic process and provides helpful context for the video. The soccer ball–size sculpture Bucky Ball (pictured) further underscores the relationship among architecture, naturally occurring forms and sports, though it can’t compete with the entrancing video. Constructed out of plant photos, Bucky Ball resembles Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome.

Culte makes the case for the importance of good craft. Affordable new-media tools and hard work enable one to achieve production values unattainable to video artists of the 20th century, when animation was prohibitively time-consuming for individuals. Carter is doing for animation what Bill Viola and Matthew Barney did for film and video: bringing big-budget effects and aesthetics into the realm of fine art.